Beer and chocolate: finding the perfect blend
Flemish chocolatier branches out in the hoping of perfectly pairing these two quintessential local favourites
First step on a long road
The Grail, though, may now have been discovered, in the view of Valentino Chocolatier of Schepdaal in Flemish Brabant. They’ve come out with an innovation: a beer brewed specifically to go with chocolate, which they already make. That wasn’t the original intention, according to Rob Roelandts, son of the founder.
“We had a chocolate here, a regional chocolate made with cherries, which needed a bit of a revamp. I suggested to one of our chocolatiers, why don’t we make a beer chocolate? He’s a chocolatier but he’s also a beer sommelier, and he said, why don’t we make our own beer?”
The next step was to determine what the beer ought to taste like, which involved tasting “hundreds of beers” with chocolate to see what characteristics go and which don’t. The new beer, he stresses, is not a chocolate-flavoured beer. “That’s exactly the point,” Roelandts says. “We didn’t want beer chocolates and we didn’t want a chocolate beer. No way we can beat Guinness, anyway. Chocolate beer says dark stout, and there are only one or two of those that rule.”
Finding a balance
The idea is to taste the Brasser beer (the name looks like the French for “to brew” but is actually the pen-name of a cartoonist, Paul De Valck, who drew cartoons for De Standaard and Het Nieuwsblad until his death in 2011, and designed the drawing on the beer’s label) alongside Valentino chocolate. The company was good enough to provide me with two options: some plain chocolate drops and pralines of milk and plain, both filled with a dark chocolate ganache.
We didn’t want beer chocolates and we didn’t want a chocolate beer
About the chocolate there’s nothing to say: Valentino has earned its spurs in that business since it was set up by Willy Roelandts and his wife, Leen De Leener, in Koekelberg, Brussels, in 1978. The pralines are rich and unctuous, while the plain chocolate drops have just the right balance of bitterness and something floral that complements the beer.
The beer is not one I would care to drink on its own. It’s perfectly well-made technically, as one would expect from the Anders brewery that made it, but it lacks that certain something that makes a beer special. It complements the chocolates perfectly, though – the drops rather than the pralines, which are themselves so rich and full of taste that they make the beer seem comparatively flat.
It could be, quite simply, that Brasser beer is a solution to a problem that doesn’t really exist. There are plenty of beers out there that can be served to complement chocolate. Another chocolatier, Laurent Gerbaud, who has a shop opposite arts centre Bozar in Brussels, has elected to go with ready-made beers selected to go with some of his wide range of chocolates, many of which involve exotic fruits.
For example, there’s the bitter but fruity Zinnebir by the Brussels-based Brasserie de la Senne, which matches with a chocolate-covered crystallised ginger. From the other Brussels brewery, Cantillon, there’s a wonderfully sour but spirited Kriek that combines with a chocolate disc topped with dried Iranian cranberries – tiny bombs of intense fruit flavour.
Then there’s the Noir de Dottignies, a deep, dark stout brewed by the Wevelgem-based brewery De Ranke, which partners with a disc of his secret recipe – a blend specially made by the Italian company Domodor of origin chocolate from Madagascar, Peru and Ecuador – topped with trinitario nibs, tiny shards of pure chocolate bean, also from Madagascar.
That selection perhaps suggests something Valentino might think about next: There may be as many chocolate-friendly beers as there are chocolates. Belgian chocolate comes in infinite varieties, and one beer can’t be expected to match them all. Brasser beer is a good place to start, however. It may just be the first step on a long road.
Retail outlets for Brasser beer can be found on the Valentino website. They are also available from specialist drinks outlets and the streekproduct shop in Halle.
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